Enterprise IT Priorities 2006

Forrester sees plenty of caution looming, spells out specific priorities for coming year

IT spending will grow by only 3.2 percent in 2006, according to new research from Forrester. The research, which surveys companies about their IT spending plans, discovered that, at the same time last year, enterprises expected to increase their IT budgets by 3.9 percent. If you add this to research that predicts a slow year in small and medium-sized business SMB- IT spending, you have a fairly gloomy picture for 2006. Unless, of course, you re a larger vendor. This is what Forrester has to say about priorities and who will benefit from them: IT shops plan to spend the majority of their efforts in securing the infrastructure, preparing for disaster, complying with government regulations, and replacing outdated systems. To do so, they will attempt to control services spend and will turn to large vendors for efficient, cost-effective solutions. On the applications side, that will be good news for the likes of Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft. Source: line56.coma>